Hickory Dickory Dock – ESL very young learners

Hickory Dickory Dock can be very boring… and repetitive… and put your very young learners to sleep.

Or, you can do an awesome 10-15 minute activity that helps your kids practice animals and numbers!

You will need:

• an audio method (tablet is best, but a USB and cassette player will work just as well)
• song or video of Hickory Dickory Dock
• a big box
• a big clock
• animals

Let’s talk a bit about where to get the materials.

1 Hickory Dickory Dock

I love Super Simple Learning’s version of Hickory Dickory Dock. You can see it here on YouTube. (Check out their learning resources for your older students!) The elephant is so adorable, and kids always laugh when he breaks the clock!

2 A big box

You’ll need a big box to hold all of your activity materials. It’s way more fun when you can knock on the box and count before opening it than just bringing your materials in a bag. A box like the one pictured will hold all of your materials for your whole class and is available at IKEA. We buy 2 at a time, just in case they get broken by rowdy students!

3 A big clock and animals

You can use a big clock and animals to re-enact Hickory Dickory Dock. If you will be teaching time, you can invest in a big clock (like this one on Amazon), or you can simply print off a picture of a clock.

For animals, you can either bring stuffed animals and animal puppets that you might have from other activities (which is lots of fun for students!), or you can print off some cute pictures of animals and laminate them.

Now let’s play!

Begin by playing the song and asking students follow-up questions during and after the song (what animal is that?, what time is it?, etc.).

Then have them knock on the big box and ask to open it (“Open, please!”). Pull out the clock and the first animal – pictures or real objects. Ask the students what the animal is, and give it to the first student who says it correctly. Repeat until all the animals are given out.

Now repeat the song, letting students re-enact the movements of the animal (going up and down the clock). Encourage them to repeat the animals and the numbers, as well as to count with the song.

When it’s the elephant’s turn, you can let the clock fall down or, if it’s a paper clock, crush it up. The students will have a big laugh.

Be sure to review the animals by saying “bye bye” to each one individually before putting it back in the box.

From Super Simple Learning

(If you use the Super Simple Learning version of this song, you can find all of the animals in their animal flashcards! Great!)

A note about our objects: 

We use a large teacher’s clock and stuffed animals.

The mouse and elephant both come from IKEA:

The cat and monkey are hand puppets from a set ordered on Amazon:

The snake was bought at a local store but is available to order online:

And the squirrel was purchased on holiday in the US, but can be found in lots of shops (we even recently found one that was a dog toy that would work perfectly!):

Teaching colors to ESL preschoolers

There are loads of cute worksheets for teaching colors to ESL students, even for young learners. You can find these for every context imaginable…

… like this introductory color-the-crayons activity, available for free on Teacherspayteachers.com.

… like this monster-themed coloring activity that incorporates early reading, available from churchhousecollection.com.

… like this Christmas-themed color-by-numbers that provides a great review of numbers, available from Super Simple Learning.

… or, like this reading activity that incorporates coloring for comprehension, available from The Moffatt Girls.

But what do we do when our students are too young for these activities? Even if kids are too little to hold a crayon, they still understand the concept of different colors and can start learning their names!

Colors are the easiest beginning lesson for very young learners because they will, for the most part, have developed this concept in their mother tongue. Here are five short activities that will engage your students while you teach them colors.

Color flashcards

Almost every colors lesson can start here: teach the students the colors on the cards. This is as easy as laminating some construction paper, and you can make it as fun as finding your favorite cartoon character in different colors. It’s great to use the words along with the colors, but it might be preferable to use solid color flashcards at the beginning so that they don’t confuse the object and the color (otherwise, you might have students calling all apples red).

For two- and three-year olds, you can start with only four colors and gradually build in more over the coming lessons.

Craft pom poms

Pom poms are great to teach colors because young students love them! You can put them inside a box, inside plastic eggs (like those you find at Easter), blindfold the students and get them to grab a handful before telling you the colors, or even ask them to pick one out of a bunch based on color. They are a great teaching tool!

Be sure to use only the bigger pom poms and watch children closely, as these can be a choking hazard!

Colored tablecloths

You can use a plastic colored table cloth for a hundred different things in preschool! For teaching colors, you can ask the students to point to a color, place a favorite toy on different colors, tell them to put different hands and feet on a color (even practice left and right for advanced students!), have students tell each other which color to touch, match objects to the colors on the table cloth, etc.

The possibilities are endless! In Spain, you can buy a variety of fun plastic table cloths called hule by the meter at discount shops. Invest 10€ into a few different ones and incorporate them into your classroom routine!

Sorting Games with Plastic Food

Learning Resources makes a fantastic fruit and veg sorting game available around the world on Amazon. But you can use any plastic food game – or, if you are brave, real fruits and veg – to practice sorting in your class. Just make sure that students are repeating the colors before sorting.

A great active game with sorting is to put a pile of fruit and veg at one end of the room and colored trays or buckets at the other end. You call out a color and the students race to grab a food that color, then put it in the correct place. If something like the game pictured above isn’t in your budget, you can use these c0lored teaching trays that you probably already have in your arsenal:

Fishing for Colors Game

We’ve used homemade fishing sets to practice numbers with great success, but you can make them with colors to give your students even more variety!

Here’s a great post on how to make your own fishing set. We simply used two wooden dowels, string tied around a square magnet (similar to how you would wrap ribbon around a gift so that it stays put!), and paper clips on cardboard fish.

And there you have it! Five fun activities to help your very young ESL students learn and practice colors.

Vocabulary game: Hangman in the ESL classroom

Hangman will become one of class’s favorite games, and it’s very easy to organize! All you need is a writing surface (blackboard, whiteboard, mobile whiteboard, etc.) and your current vocabulary. This should be an easy activity to practice memorizing the vocab before moving on to more difficult activities utilizing the vocab.

This activity also helps practice the alphabet, so it should be used for students five and older (unless they already know the alphabet).

Put the students into two groups. Write the spaces for the letters and draw the gallows. Give student A from the first group a chance to give a letter. If it’s right, fill in the letter’s space. If not, write it below the word and add one part to the hangman. It’s a good idea to explain to students before you start what parts you will add – a chance to review body parts!

  
Then student A from the second group goes, then student B from the first group, etc. You can establish your own house rules, but we like to tell students that they can only guess the full word when it’s their turn. Give the group a point when one of the student from that group guesses a word. If you like, keep a running tally for the weekly/monthly championship.

They will love it, and you’ll have a fun game to review vocab!

St. Patrick’s Day Activity for Primary Students

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, and we’ve been in full green for two weeks! In an effort to teach students about the importance of wearing green, not to say “St. Paddy’s Day,” and that Ireland is a country in Europe, we decided to do a great activity for 1º-3º of primary school (ages 6-9).

We began with a Powerpoint activity explaining, in very simple terms, the following facts about St. Patrick:

• St. Patrick is an Irish legend.
• Patrick was a priest who lived in Ireland. There were also a lot of snakes living in Ireland, and people were scared of them.
• Patrick wanted to help the people, so he took his drum and played loudly to scare all of the snakes. He walked all over the island until he scared every last snake.
• Today, you can’t find snakes in Ireland.

For the 3º graders, we added the “real” story of St. Patrick to practice the past tense verbs that they’re studying right now in English class.

Then, we added a craft activity. For 1º and 2º, we used piper cleaners and plastic beads to make little snakes like these:

From Pinterest.com

For the 3º graders, we had them bring in a magazine and made a collage snake with one googly eye. Here’s a great idea:

From Pinterest.com

The students love making the snakes! Then, we planned a “visit from St. Patrick” for the 16th and 17th of March.

We used the following items to make a St. Patrick costume: a monk’s tunic (found at a costume store) with a cross necklace; plain mocassins (you could also use sandals); a white wig and beard (to keep the students from recognizing us); and a large djembe drum.

One teacher introduced St. Patrick to the class and asked questions about what they could remember from the Powerpoint presentation. Then St. Patrick played the drum and “collected” all the snakes in the class. He finally gave them a picture of a Shamrock, which they could wear if they didn’t have any green!

St. Patrick’s Day was a real hit!

Beautiful ESL Christmas Activities to Display

It’s that time of year! We are rehearsing “Jingle Bells,” we are juggling exams and grading, and we are trying to teach our students a bit about our English-speaking cultural holiday traditions! At our school, we focus on Christmas, although many of our activities have a general winter theme so that we don’t interfer with anyone’s cultural or religious followings.

Today we’re sharing our three new activities for this year!

1. Very young ESL learners and The Christmas Tree

One of the first things that we teach students when studying about Christmas is the tradition of a Christmas tree. This can tie in nicely with their science courses (the parts of a tree; deciduous vs evergreen; trees around the world; etc.) and the vocabulary is easy enough.

We use the Christmas carol O Christmas Tree as a sing-a-long in the class. Then, each student gets to decorate an ornament (which we found on Google Images and pasted to card to make them sturdy) and hang it on our big primary tree.

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Finally, help them read the lyrics to O Christmas Tree that you’ve printed out on a piece of paper. Add a color-by-number Christmas tree to half of the paper and fast finishers can color another beautiful decoration!

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2. Dextrous ESL learners and The Recycled Snowman

This activity is great paired with a cute story about a snowman or playing in the snow. We found three appropriate stories in English in the youth section of our local library, and Amazon.com and Abebooks.com has lots of possibilities! (Don’t forget that you can download lots of ebook options if you have a projector in your class!)

Then we make a little snowman out of a recycled toilet paper roll (ah, the neverending craft supply box!) and a recycled sock. Googly eyes and white stickers that can be painted as buttons and then stuck on quickly help this activity to run smoothly. This requires a bit of preparation, but this website walks you through it. These are super adorable but not for tiny fingers!

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3. Late Primary Students and The Snowflake Wonderland

Moving away from the traditional themes of Christmas and more towards the theme of winter wonderland, this activity allows us to talk about the science behind snowflakes. Why do snowflakes form (lesson on solids, liquids and gases)? How many sides do snowflakes have (lesson on geometry and symmetry)? Where can we see snowflakes (general winter vocabulary lesson)? Have you seen any films with snowflakes (our students are going crazy – in a good way – when they sing “Let it Go” from the film Frozen and then gap fill the lyrics)?

As a craft, they can make their own paper snowflakes and create a winter wonderland in a room or corridor. This website teaches you how to make them (depending on the age, your students might need a bit of help with the last step before cutting).

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All of these activities will please parents and other teachers, decorate your learning space (think less bulletin board duties for you!), and give your students a great use for their pre-holidays energy.

What’s your favorite Christmas activity? Share it with us in a comment! And have a happy holiday season!

Great Introductory Activity for ESL Young Learners

So how do we get very young ESL learners into the zone for learning English? We’ve already talked about the importance of establishing a classroom routine that students will learn and be excited to repeat. If we incorporate our greeting into each class, it will form part of the classroom routine and will encourage students to start speaking English from the first minute of class!

One of our tried-and-true activities for starting off classes with very young learners is a simple song with puppets that allow students to imitate what they are hearing. This works for students 1-3 years old, and you can adapt it with more difficult songs for older students.

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We recommend getting lots of varieties of puppets so that this activity is interesting each time, yet still predictable enough that students will be comfortable with it. Some of our favorite puppets are: animal hand puppets (like these from Amazon.com), plastic finger puppets that stand up well to teething little ones who will always put whatever you hand them into their mouths (like these, also from Amazon.com or Oriental Trading Company), felt finger puppets (like these from Ikea), and puppets that relate to something they already know (like these, if you have read or sang “Five Little Monkeys” with your young learners).

ESL young learners can get excited by puppets! Copyright http://www.abingdonmusic.co.uk

Here’s how to do the activity, which takes 3-7 minutes, depending on our students:

1. Show students a box which contains the puppets, asking “What’s in the box?” We can shake the box, put it to our ears, knock on it, and do other things to draw the students’ attention to the box.
2. Ask students if there is a banana (or other cognate) in the box. How about a car? (making vroom vroom noises)
3. Open the box and show students the puppets. We’ll hold the box close to us or away from the students so that they don’t immediately grab the puppets.
4. We will take out two puppets, put them on our fingers, and put the lid on the box.
5. Play this simple Hello Song offered on YouTube by Turn On Your English. We always play from 0:19-0:55 so that it’s a quick and fun song. (Remember to face your screen away from the students if they get distracted by the video, or simply use a recording.) Use each puppet to mimic what the puppet on the screen (or in the song) is doing, so that it seems like the puppets are truly greeting each other.
6. Now, we’ll invite the students to take part in the fun! Allow each student to pick out a puppet (build their English by first asking “Would you like a puppet? Yes, please?” and getting them to respond “Please.” Work up to “Yes, please,” and finally, “May I have a puppet, please?”). Repeat the song with the students, encouraging them to sing.

It will take a few classes before the students open up, come to expect the puppets’ presence, and want to start singing. But every (let’s face it, repetitive) second that you invest in this activity will help set a positive and motivating tone for the rest of your class. Eventually, your students will scream “puppets!” when they see the box, want to be the first to pick out a puppet (thus improving their behavior) and will start singing their greetings.

What other introductory activities work well in your ESL young learners classroom?

Going Bananas for Numbers!

If you’re looking for a way to spruce up your lessons on numbers 1-10, just go bananas!

It’s a great idea to incorporate different types of materials into each theme. For example, if you just practicing counting 1-10, both you and your students are going to get pretty bored, pretty quickly. But if you include a song, a story, a craft, a game or an activity where students get to move around, then they are going to learn the lesson in the context of the activity. They’ll be having so much fun that they won’t even realize that they’re learning, and you’ll be one happy teacher!

Here’s a great idea for a few ways to teach numbers 1-10 using the context of a banana…

Let’s start with a song. This song is great for very young learners, and you can expand on it for slightly older students (6-7) by asking what each group of bananas is doing:

Now let’s go for a game to reenforce the numbers that they have learned in the song. This game is great for small groups, but if you want to do it with a larger group, you just have to duplicate (or triplicate) the materials. I call this the “Banana Clothespins Game,” and it requires a little bit of preparation. You’ll need:

• 10 half-sheets of card or paper, each decorated with 1-10 bananas (you can draw the bananas or print them on a computer)
  • These will be your 1-10 banana flashcards!
• 55 clothespins (full-size clothespins work best for little fingers, but recycle them from home if you have them!)

Once you have your materials prepared, you’re ready to play!

Example of banana flashcards. Image Copyright Super Simple Learning.

• Begin by showing the students the 1 banana flashcard and put 2 clothespins on it. Ask if it’s correct and let them help you fix it. Repeat with another banana flashcard, first giving the incorrect number and letting the students help you. Then give them two correct examples.
• Now put all of the banana flashcards face-down and shuffle them. Deal them out evenly among students. Tell them that it’s a surprise and not to turn them over!
• Put the clothespins in the middle of the group.
• Explain the gameplay: Each student turns over his or her flashcards and puts the correct number of clothespins on the card. The first to finish all of his or her flashcards correctly wins (so you might want to make sure that you deal each student some high and low numbers to keep things fair).
• Children love this game, and it can be played several times to review the numbers!

Now that students have practiced the numbers, let’s tell them a story about a little banana who falls out of a tree and wants to return to his family! This story is called “Fruit Story: ESL numbers/colors/fruit.” It also incorporates other fruits as well as colors!

If you are lucky enough to have a big budget for your classroom, you can also invest in this awesome monkey counting game that can be played in small groups. It’s available on Amazon!

Now that we’ve talked gone bananas over numbers, let’s make a craft! What animal loves bananas more than anything else? Monkeys! Let your students make a monkey mask, helping them to cut out the eyes carefully. You’ll need a little yarn to tie on the mask.

Courtesy of craftjr.com

You can print off some bananas with this image and let each student “feed the monkeys.” Try to print 10-15 on one page so that you can give students different numbers to practice! This is a great way to review counting again, as you can ask how many bananas they are feeding each other. Let them show the rest of the group and then do it in pairs!

These activities will give you several fun classes to learn and review the numbers 1-10 with your young learners! Just don’t go bananas when you hear students ask again for the banana song!

 

Re-Thinking ESL for Young Learners

One of the first questions that people ask me when they want advice on how to learn English is “What book do you recommend?“

Unfortunately, learning foreign languages is still growing out of a detrimental phase in which everything was done, literally, by the book. So what do you do when your students cannot be taught by the book, mainly because they’re young learners who cannot read or write?

In order to capitalize on the skills that very young learners (1-5 years old) do use, it’s important to adjust our lesson plans and learning goals for our target audience.

Very young learners can recognize patterns, respond to verbal commands (1-2 years old), sort colors, repeat, sing, move (2-3 years old), begin to produce the target language spontaneously and recognize word/meaning relationships (4-5 years old).

So how do we make our lesson plans useable for these age groups without “dumbing them down” to the point where they are not fun and not even that useful? We just have to use a bit of imagination!

Let’s use the human body as an example:

In a bilingual sixth grade learning environment, most students will be able to recognize and produce the organs, senses, movements, and parts of the human body.

Production is no longer an issue with these older children!

In a bilingual third grade environment, most students will be able to recognize and produce the major organs and parts of the body.

Reading and writing help students learn quicker at this age!

In a bilingual first grade environment, students will be able to recognize major parts of the body (head, trunk, legs, arms) and perhaps produce these words through matching with pictures or other similar activities.

Lots of images and realia will help this age group learn quickly!

Beyond that, we cannot count on standing in front of a blackboard and pointing at a poster in order to teach the parts of the body. But we can use other tactics!

For one-year olds, we can use dolls or animals to teach parts of the body. For example, by giving each student a doll and a toy feather, we can show students to touch eyes, nose, mouth, etc., repeating the name many times and showing them with our own doll and feather. We can’t expect students to repeat the names, but we do want them to mimic our movements.

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For two-year olds, we can use the same technique with the doll and feather. But now we can ask them to relate it to their own bodies. Say “Touch your dolly’s eyes. Where are your eyes, Juan?” It will still be difficult to get this age group to spontaneously produce the words, but they should be able to recognize and repeat them. Two-year olds want to touch, move, and do! Let them!

For three-year olds, their oral skills are developed enough to where they can learn the names of body parts. A great activity is to make a small poster with only a stomach and a head. Then you make the parts (legs, arms, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, feet, hands, etc.) and use Blue Tack or velcro to attach them to the poster. You can hold up the part of the body to the students and the first one to respond with the correct name of the body part gets to stick it on the poster! Games are a great way to motivate this age group!

What better activity than Mr. Potato Head to learn body parts? Toys can be great learning tools!

For four-year olds and five-year olds, you can start counting on a longer-term memory function with vocabulary words. This allows you to play “Simon Says” or “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” You can also begin to use students as the model, asking a volunteer “Where is Jenny’s head?” or “What is this?” (“Jenny’s head!”). Games and reward systems really motivate this age group.

Using the human body as an example, we have seen that there are many different ways of approaching the material based on the target audience’s age group! What are some of your favorite adaptations? Leave us a comment!

Popsicle Stick Puzzles

I love making popsicle stick puzzles with my students because they are so versatile! They work well for students as young as two and as old as ten!

Lots of amazing popsicle stick puzzle on Pinterest.com

You need very few materials to make a popsicle stick puzzle, and you can use them for specific lesson themes or as an extra activity! They are a great activity for fast finishers in the classroom!

You can make several popsicle stick puzzles to work on a particular vocabulary set, such as these animal puzzles:

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Or you can have students create their own popsicle stick puzzles as a time filler:

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In order to make popsicle stick puzzles, you will need:

• 10 popsicle sticks per student (I buy popsicle sticks in bulk at Asian bazars or “chinos” here in Madrid)
• tape
• decorations, like:
  • paint and paintbrush
  • markers
  • crayons
  • pictures and glue
• scissors

Here’s how you make popsicle stick puzzles!

1. Line up 10 popsicle sticks and tape the top, middle and bottom of the sticks together.
2. Turn the popsicle sticks over and decorate.
3. After they are dry, remove the tape. If you have glued a picture to the front of the popsicle sticks, you will need to use a razor blade or scissors to cut apart the picture between the sticks. Do not let children complete any steps with razors or scissors if they are not able to do so safely.
4. Mix up the sticks and let students put them together!

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Here are a few of the popsicle stick puzzles that I made with my students this summer! One student was two and one was five. Since we were working on colors and numbers at the time, I focused on the primary colors and numbered the back of each popsicle stick (1-10) so that they could put them in order based on numbers and then based on the picture.

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